You know how you can make hope go away,
Make your soul grow dim?
By denying the kindness within.
You can stamp on your dreams
And crush them with your heel
Every time you feel that spark of light

Some of us were trained to do that
We were children of fear
Who knew that every Silverlining has a cloud
We prepared ourselves each morning
To resist, refuse, deny desire
Desire for anything
A toy, a friend, a future
(We make great fundamentalist Christians by the way)

Our job is to be happy
But the law of attraction makes us mad
Teasing us with some formula that we cannot compute.
Our secret code is kindness
Compassion for the child
Who lived in torment
Unhelpfully broken by sporadic splashes of sunshine
She knew not to trust the glimmers of hope,
She lived ready for disappointment.
Try undoing that if you dare
It is not for the faint hearted
This healing business.
Know that the hands that reach out to you
Won’t be perfect
But they will be perfectly designed
According to the curriculum
You chose before you came
Remember you are a student of love
You can create in the sky a blaze of sunshine
If you are willing
to remember that hope only comes
When we root out
every hint of cruelty
In favour of every shade of kindness.